I find it very interesting that slashdot is running an article on this very topic. I, personally, have been working on some PHP based on-line community type software. Sort of mixing some of the BBS stuff from days of old, with new technology, as well.
I'd definitely be interested in hearing what types of features and functions people who are interested in doing this type of thing would find useful.
Though my site has no specific Geographic limitations, the vast majority of it's users are from Michigan and Louisiana. I find it really quite difficult to get most 'net users into message boards, and such.. but perhaps I just don't have the right layout/format.
I'm open to all ideas, and I'd love to contribute work to a project, if there's anyone out there that's thinking of doing something like this.
In 1998, illegal copying of software resulted in losses of more than $2.9 billion in the U.S. alone.* This has a significant impact on the U.S. economy. In 1998, software piracy cost the U.S. 109,000 jobs, $4.5 billion in lost wages and nearly $1 billion in lost tax revenue.**
Umm.. yeah, right. I wanna see some documents to back THIS up. Let's audit the BSA!
But it's really not at all impressive. It's standard Intel hardware, through and through. Only thing you'd have to do that's nonstandard is get the secondary display up and running, and im sure that that's probably just a serial device.
OMFG, my Sprint people are going to get a serious laugh out of this (the two that I talk to on a regular basis know their network is a piece of crap)... The article omits that it's talking about 3G CDMA service, and says:
Verizon Wireless and Sprint PCS have built a telephone network using a competing standard known as Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA (news - web sites)). Verizon has launched its network and Sprint PCS is expected to turn on its network this summer, but neither company has yet introduced new phones. The companies would not say if their new phones will cost more.
---
By the way, Sprint's customer base is proof positive thaet people will spend $100+ for a phone -- they hardly ever have phones for less than $100, and most people buy phones for $150-$200. And Sprint is still subsidizing the cost of the phones.. at least, they tell us they are. lol.
AT&T: 1900MHz TDMA Cingular: 800MHz AMPS (analog)/800MHz TDMA VoiceStream: 800MHz GSM - I'm so unfamiliar with VoiceStream, but i am a friend with one of their regional sales managers.. and he says they have three different types of GSM networks? They might be 1800 or 1900 MHz GSM
I have not seen any phones that were more than triple-mode: 1900MHz/800MHz CDMA digital/800Mhz analog. Anyone know of any phones that talk multiple protocols, besides one brand of digital/analog?
Not that it would be cheap, I'm sure that AT&T would charge Verizon customers an arm, a leg, and their right buttock to roam on their network. lol
Someone brought up . hey.. make a cell phone scanner.. Exactly.
There goes digital cellular security right out the window.
Though i'm certain that someone could already do it, it'd probably be a lot easier to hack up a phone to do some crazy whack ass shit like scan other digital calls, if that phone was allowed to access the network.
Verizon now offers two-way text messaging, sent from the phones, to the phones,tha twill operate with any other U.S. based carrier.
I haven't tested this, but this is what i've been informed of.
SPCS phones don't use 2-way (they apparently did not buy that option to send from the handsets from Qualcomm, considering that there isn't ONE SPCS phone [that i'm aware of -- i may be wrong] that can send messages from the handset, without using the browser), so you would be able to drop email from the phone's browser to phonenumber@network.com...
The other U.S. carriers i really don't know much about.
Unfortunatly, this lawsuit, if successful, would likely bring upon the world a gigantic shit pile of junk phones - I'm certain that Sprint PCS and Verizon would LOVE to have Nokia phones available besides the forever standby of the 5185 and the "newish" 3285 models.
However, UNTIL Nokia turns out a handset that has decent quality of service, that will operate on CDMA, don't expect SPCS or Verizon to accept that!
One thing that I do know is that Verizon phones MUST all have pull out antennas - not only do the phones receive better service, they have longer battery life times, and you're not putting as much radiation into yer head. I don't know if SPCS has adapted this policy or not, but last summer was the last time that I saw a fixed antenna SPCS phone, so maybe they have.
It's not all about features - it's about quality control.
There's no reason why you couldn't take a SprintPCS tri-mode phone, and activate it as a tri-mode phone on Verizon's service - except that SprintPCS would have to give up the subsidy lock code on the phone. Once you had that, you could program it for Verizon's service.
The reason why Verizon phones wouldn't operate on Sprint PCS network is because Sprint PCS won't allow any phone that they have not purchased from the manufacturer to operate. If they don't have the ESN of that phone entered into their database, no activation.
It's not foul play - it's fair play. No one's saying "You can't make a phone that will work with our network" - they are saying "Make a quality phone that works with our network, and we'll sell it."
This would be like forcing people to provide service for things that can't possibly work - ie, a TDMA phone will NOT talk to a CDMA network - it can't be done. Just like my toaster doesn't talk to my refrigerator.
You went to great lengths to write a well-written reply, that's just plain stupid. Sorry to say that. I really don't mean to be a troll. Let me rephrase that. This is stupid, In My Opinion.
We are talking about -two- different revenue streams here to generate income to keep things running. Tell you what: It costs VA/Andover to operate Slashdot. There are banner ads here, and no one really cares all that much, that I know of. The advertisers that pay VA/Andover to host these banners on slashdot want bigger banners, so they can continue to maintain the income stream that they have had from the banners.
They are also talking about making a subscription service to supplement the lost income from NOT displaying banners.
OK, I know this is a really simple outlook, but just to throw out some numbers (and this is by NO MEANS WHATSOEVER real, or even close), say for every ad viewed, the company sponsoring that ad paid slashdot/va/andover $0.01 to serve that ad up. Now you go and remove all the advertising content from it, yet use up your share of slashdot's bandwidth - You're a liability, not generating your $0.01 per view. You're costing slashdot/va/andover, with no generated income to replace that. You're not part of the solution - you're part of the problem.
THIS is the purpose of the subscription system - surely slashdot could have just decided "ok, let's put in the larger ads that all the advertisers want", and kept their revenue stream the same. However, they are allowing you the CHOICE of replacing their revenue stream from advertisers, by a revenue stream from yourself.
It costs money to run a web-site.
You are NOT required to pay Slashdot. "This is an attempt to graft a revenue stream onto an aspect of a business that should not have one."
Let me guess - you've never run a business? When you're in business, your purpose is to have POSITIVE incoming cashflow. You don't pay to do something solely because people like it, and you won't see any benefit from doing it!
"Some revenue could be generated with relatively unobtrusive banner ads"... hello? There's been a banner ad at the top of slashdot for the 3 or 4 years that I've been reading it! The people who are paying this income for slashdot are telling them that they want larger ads, to maintain the same amount of income (or perhaps even an increase)
My experience is that people generally ignore banner ads. I ignore the banner ad on EVERYTHING unless it GETS RIGHT THE FUCK UP IN MY FACE AND SAYS "READ ME YOU FUCKING BITCH!" in neon pastel colors on neon pastel backgrounds. That's why the ad companies want larger ads. People will learn to ignore those too. Advertising on sites is certainly not createing a barrier-of-entry for other places on the 'net.
"People aren't going to choose Slashdot, anymore."? OK, so what are my other choices?
This is not about adding a revenue stream to something that doesn't have one now - it's about maintaining the existing revenue stream that is being threatened.
Or did you not bother to read anything in the original message?
I had a guy ask to buy 100 of them off me. They're great little devices, if you can come up with a use for them. Honestly, although they are written off, they are still sitting in the backroom waiting for the hammer. I am NOT spending MY time breaking 358 of the damn things when I've got far better things to do.:-)
I live in Michigan, and got arrested a few months back, for a traffic violation that I had forgotten to pay on. (doh)
After sitting in jail for about 4 hours, I was escorted to a room about the size of a walk-in closet, that contained a TV and a microphone. The judge was in a courtroom 15 miles north of the holding cell, and we discussed the issue at hand via a 56k video conference. pretty cool, a bit jerky, but the resolution wasn't bad for a 13 inch TV screen.
so parts of this have been going already - the district i was arrested in shares their court facilities with the neighboring district, so rather than spend the money to transport people around and around all over town, they just get a live modem link. it's pretty neat. of course, my head was spinning from the whole "geek in jail" experience, so i don't remember much else about it.. but i was impressed that people were actually putting tech to good use.
Then they even FAXed the documents for my release over to the station, and let me go.
I'd just like to say one thing, re: GCC 2.96 vs 2.95.
RedHat 7.0 comes with 2.96 installed. Virtually everything on my system was compiled with 2.96, and I had EXTREME video issues when attempting to use anything with GL or DRI.
After getting this big warning the first time I installed MPlayer, I decided to try something. I re-installed RedHat 7.0 from scratch, then backleveled to GCC 2.95, and THEN recompiled everything (kernel, modules, X, so on so forth) with 2.95. Suddenly, GL works just fine.
by the way, Opera does rock for the most part. Opera 6 for Windows is awesome - it even rocks pretty hard under a good WINE installation in Linux.
I'm currently using the Linux 6.0 TP2 release, and it is blazing fast, except for the occasions where it gets hung up on DNS. It does crash More than the Windows ver under WINE though, and the Windows ver under WinE crashes more than the Windows ver under Windows. (I have the Win ver installed on an Xp box in the other room, it ROCKS compared to using the built in IE shit)
Gecko is a steaming, slow pile of shit in everything that it has been packaged in that Ive seen. Galeon is incredibly slow when compared to Opera, and Galeon is the lightest Gecko based browser that I can find.
i really wish that Evolution had the ability to load HTML mail into a different browser, because just hitting it in the preview pane with Gecko causes a 3-5 second lag time before Evolution starts responding again, and that's before it even gets the message displaying.
Try this. Print a hard copy of your resume as it looks on the screen in Star Office or Kde Office, or whatever. Then take THAT to Kinkos and have them make copies.
Cheaper, too.
i reported some 170+ bugs in the rendering engine of IE 5.5. None of which are actually fixed in 6.0, unless you use some special HTML codes to turn on the bugfixes. LOL!
What utter pieces of shit their bug reporting facilities are, and how they respond to them.
As far as tech support goes, they have always been absolutely useless to me as well, on the 5 or 6 calls i've bothered to make in my career. Usually I just turn to other netpeople if I need help with something, since the average 12 year old seems to know more about the microsoft products than the tech support people do.
I would just like to note that IRC-2.mit.EDU has been running for far longer than irc.colorado.edu. However, it has not been part of EFnet for a good many years now.
I'd be willing to bet that the U.S. forces in Kabul have seriously increased the amount of Internet Accessibility in the general area - I KNOW for a FACT, that there had been relatively widespread internet access in *.AF in the time of the gulf war, as I had several contacts in that area, during that point in time.
It's likely that the U.S. forces have restored access to the area in a relatively short period of time - even the military boys like the Internet.
That is totally correct. I got a free $0.35 out of it that way. lol.
PayPal, when you setup your checking account, will make two small deposits to it, which you then have to verify the amounts to activate the checking account. I thought it was a very cool way of verification (not to mention, I ended up $0.35 richer. heh)
Hey, I -have- seen Windows 1.3, though. (NOT 3.1, 1.3) Pretty daaaaaaamn funny.
Single tasking, task switching. I think the "DOSSHELL" that implemented "Task Switching" was based upon it.
It might even have BEEN it.
LOL
Talk about a total piece of trash...
And then I remember Windows 2.0. I saw that one too. On my 4-color CGA card. I formatted my hard drive immediatly after running it. Hey, I did that after installing 3.0, and 3.1, too. But instead of reinstalling DOS/Win with 3.0 and 3.1, I installed Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
I find it very interesting that slashdot is running an article on this very topic. I, personally, have been working on some PHP based on-line community type software. Sort of mixing some of the BBS stuff from days of old, with new technology, as well.
MAGE
I'd definitely be interested in hearing what types of features and functions people who are interested in doing this type of thing would find useful.
Though my site has no specific Geographic limitations, the vast majority of it's users are from Michigan and Louisiana. I find it really quite difficult to get most 'net users into message boards, and such.. but perhaps I just don't have the right layout/format.
I'm open to all ideas, and I'd love to contribute work to a project, if there's anyone out there that's thinking of doing something like this.
Umm.. yeah, right.
I wanna see some documents to back THIS up. Let's audit the BSA!
But it's really not at all impressive. It's standard Intel hardware, through and through. Only thing you'd have to do that's nonstandard is get the secondary display up and running, and im sure that that's probably just a serial device.
OMFG, my Sprint people are going to get a serious laugh out of this (the two that I talk to on a regular basis know their network is a piece of crap) ... The article omits that it's talking about 3G CDMA service, and says:
.. at least, they tell us they are. lol.
Verizon Wireless and Sprint PCS have built a telephone network using a competing standard known as Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA (news - web sites)). Verizon has launched its network and Sprint PCS is expected to turn on its network this summer, but neither company has yet introduced new phones. The companies would not say if their new phones will cost more.
---
By the way, Sprint's customer base is proof positive thaet people will spend $100+ for a phone -- they hardly ever have phones for less than $100, and most people buy phones for $150-$200. And Sprint is still subsidizing the cost of the phones
*thinks* Here's the big carriers:
AT&T: 1900MHz TDMA
Cingular: 800MHz AMPS (analog)/800MHz TDMA
VoiceStream: 800MHz GSM - I'm so unfamiliar with VoiceStream, but i am a friend with one of their regional sales managers.. and he says they have three different types of GSM networks? They might be 1800 or 1900 MHz GSM
Sprint PCS: 1900MHz CDMA
Verizon: 800MHz AMPS(analog), 800MHz CDMA, 1900MHz CDMA (depending on locations)
I have not seen any phones that were more than triple-mode: 1900MHz/800MHz CDMA digital/800Mhz analog. Anyone know of any phones that talk multiple protocols, besides one brand of digital/analog?
Not that it would be cheap, I'm sure that AT&T would charge Verizon customers an arm, a leg, and their right buttock to roam on their network. lol
Someone brought up . hey.. make a cell phone scanner.. Exactly.
There goes digital cellular security right out the window.
Though i'm certain that someone could already do it, it'd probably be a lot easier to hack up a phone to do some crazy whack ass shit like scan other digital calls, if that phone was allowed to access the network.
Verizon now offers two-way text messaging, sent from the phones, to the phones ,tha twill operate with any other U.S. based carrier.
...
I haven't tested this, but this is what i've been informed of.
SPCS phones don't use 2-way (they apparently did not buy that option to send from the handsets from Qualcomm, considering that there isn't ONE SPCS phone [that i'm aware of -- i may be wrong] that can send messages from the handset, without using the browser), so you would be able to drop email from the phone's browser to phonenumber@network.com
The other U.S. carriers i really don't know much about.
Er... what model phone do you have that speaks both GSM and CDMA? HMm?
Bryan,
Unfortunatly, this lawsuit, if successful, would likely bring upon the world a gigantic shit pile of junk phones - I'm certain that Sprint PCS and Verizon would LOVE to have Nokia phones available besides the forever standby of the 5185 and the "newish" 3285 models.
However, UNTIL Nokia turns out a handset that has decent quality of service, that will operate on CDMA, don't expect SPCS or Verizon to accept that!
One thing that I do know is that Verizon phones MUST all have pull out antennas - not only do the phones receive better service, they have longer battery life times, and you're not putting as much radiation into yer head. I don't know if SPCS has adapted this policy or not, but last summer was the last time that I saw a fixed antenna SPCS phone, so maybe they have.
It's not all about features - it's about quality control.
There's no reason why you couldn't take a SprintPCS tri-mode phone, and activate it as a tri-mode phone on Verizon's service - except that SprintPCS would have to give up the subsidy lock code on the phone. Once you had that, you could program it for Verizon's service.
The reason why Verizon phones wouldn't operate on Sprint PCS network is because Sprint PCS won't allow any phone that they have not purchased from the manufacturer to operate. If they don't have the ESN of that phone entered into their database, no activation.
It's not foul play - it's fair play. No one's saying "You can't make a phone that will work with our network" - they are saying "Make a quality phone that works with our network, and we'll sell it."
This would be like forcing people to provide service for things that can't possibly work - ie, a TDMA phone will NOT talk to a CDMA network - it can't be done. Just like my toaster doesn't talk to my refrigerator.
OK, sir, this is just stupid. Really.
You went to great lengths to write a well-written reply, that's just plain stupid. Sorry to say that. I really don't mean to be a troll. Let me rephrase that. This is stupid, In My Opinion.
We are talking about -two- different revenue streams here to generate income to keep things running. Tell you what: It costs VA/Andover to operate Slashdot. There are banner ads here, and no one really cares all that much, that I know of. The advertisers that pay VA/Andover to host these banners on slashdot want bigger banners, so they can continue to maintain the income stream that they have had from the banners.
They are also talking about making a subscription service to supplement the lost income from NOT displaying banners.
OK, I know this is a really simple outlook, but just to throw out some numbers (and this is by NO MEANS WHATSOEVER real, or even close), say for every ad viewed, the company sponsoring that ad paid slashdot/va/andover $0.01 to serve that ad up. Now you go and remove all the advertising content from it, yet use up your share of slashdot's bandwidth - You're a liability, not generating your $0.01 per view. You're costing slashdot/va/andover, with no generated income to replace that. You're not part of the solution - you're part of the problem.
THIS is the purpose of the subscription system - surely slashdot could have just decided "ok, let's put in the larger ads that all the advertisers want", and kept their revenue stream the same. However, they are allowing you the CHOICE of replacing their revenue stream from advertisers, by a revenue stream from yourself.
It costs money to run a web-site.
You are NOT required to pay Slashdot.
"This is an attempt to graft a revenue stream onto an aspect of a business that should not have one."
Let me guess - you've never run a business? When you're in business, your purpose is to have POSITIVE incoming cashflow. You don't pay to do something solely because people like it, and you won't see any benefit from doing it!
"Some revenue could be generated with relatively unobtrusive banner ads"... hello? There's been a banner ad at the top of slashdot for the 3 or 4 years that I've been reading it! The people who are paying this income for slashdot are telling them that they want larger ads, to maintain the same amount of income (or perhaps even an increase)
My experience is that people generally ignore banner ads. I ignore the banner ad on EVERYTHING unless it GETS RIGHT THE FUCK UP IN MY FACE AND SAYS "READ ME YOU FUCKING BITCH!" in neon pastel colors on neon pastel backgrounds. That's why the ad companies want larger ads. People will learn to ignore those too. Advertising on sites is certainly not createing a barrier-of-entry for other places on the 'net.
"People aren't going to choose Slashdot, anymore."? OK, so what are my other choices?
This is not about adding a revenue stream to something that doesn't have one now - it's about maintaining the existing revenue stream that is being threatened.
Or did you not bother to read anything in the original message?
I had a guy ask to buy 100 of them off me. They're great little devices, if you can come up with a use for them. Honestly, although they are written off, they are still sitting in the backroom waiting for the hammer. I am NOT spending MY time breaking 358 of the damn things when I've got far better things to do. :-)
I live in Michigan, and got arrested a few months back, for a traffic violation that I had forgotten to pay on. (doh)
After sitting in jail for about 4 hours, I was escorted to a room about the size of a walk-in closet, that contained a TV and a microphone. The judge was in a courtroom 15 miles north of the holding cell, and we discussed the issue at hand via a 56k video conference. pretty cool, a bit jerky, but the resolution wasn't bad for a 13 inch TV screen.
so parts of this have been going already - the district i was arrested in shares their court facilities with the neighboring district, so rather than spend the money to transport people around and around all over town, they just get a live modem link. it's pretty neat. of course, my head was spinning from the whole "geek in jail" experience, so i don't remember much else about it.. but i was impressed that people were actually putting tech to good use.
Then they even FAXed the documents for my release over to the station, and let me go.
I'd just like to say one thing, re: GCC 2.96 vs 2.95.
RedHat 7.0 comes with 2.96 installed. Virtually everything on my system was compiled with 2.96, and I had EXTREME video issues when attempting to use anything with GL or DRI.
After getting this big warning the first time I installed MPlayer, I decided to try something. I re-installed RedHat 7.0 from scratch, then backleveled to GCC 2.95, and THEN recompiled everything (kernel, modules, X, so on so forth) with 2.95. Suddenly, GL works just fine.
by the way, Opera does rock for the most part. Opera 6 for Windows is awesome - it even rocks pretty hard under a good WINE installation in Linux.
I'm currently using the Linux 6.0 TP2 release, and it is blazing fast, except for the occasions where it gets hung up on DNS. It does crash More than the Windows ver under WINE though, and the Windows ver under WinE crashes more than the Windows ver under Windows. (I have the Win ver installed on an Xp box in the other room, it ROCKS compared to using the built in IE shit)
Gecko is a steaming, slow pile of shit in everything that it has been packaged in that Ive seen. Galeon is incredibly slow when compared to Opera, and Galeon is the lightest Gecko based browser that I can find.
i really wish that Evolution had the ability to load HTML mail into a different browser, because just hitting it in the preview pane with Gecko causes a 3-5 second lag time before Evolution starts responding again, and that's before it even gets the message displaying.
Try this. Print a hard copy of your resume as it looks on the screen in Star Office or Kde Office, or whatever. Then take THAT to Kinkos and have them make copies.
Cheaper, too.
i reported some 170+ bugs in the rendering engine of IE 5.5. None of which are actually fixed in 6.0, unless you use some special HTML codes to turn on the bugfixes. LOL!
What utter pieces of shit their bug reporting facilities are, and how they respond to them.
As far as tech support goes, they have always been absolutely useless to me as well, on the 5 or 6 calls i've bothered to make in my career. Usually I just turn to other netpeople if I need help with something, since the average 12 year old seems to know more about the microsoft products than the tech support people do.
wow, i saw this on the news friday night.
I would just like to note that IRC-2.mit.EDU has been running for far longer than irc.colorado.edu. However, it has not been part of EFnet for a good many years now.
well, if i had $400 to spare right now, i'd happily go in on it...
what i need to know:
can we get quake3:arena up and running on it?
i need a handheld Q3.
I'd be willing to bet that the U.S. forces in Kabul have seriously increased the amount of Internet Accessibility in the general area - I KNOW for a FACT, that there had been relatively widespread internet access in *.AF in the time of the gulf war, as I had several contacts in that area, during that point in time.
It's likely that the U.S. forces have restored access to the area in a relatively short period of time - even the military boys like the Internet.
Obviously, dumbass, he meant "Get Microsoft" as in terrorist activity towards Microsoft. Duh.
That is totally correct. I got a free $0.35 out of it that way. lol.
PayPal, when you setup your checking account, will make two small deposits to it, which you then have to verify the amounts to activate the checking account. I thought it was a very cool way of verification (not to mention, I ended up $0.35 richer. heh)
Hey, I -have- seen Windows 1.3, though. (NOT 3.1, 1.3) Pretty daaaaaaamn funny.
Single tasking, task switching. I think the "DOSSHELL" that implemented "Task Switching" was based upon it.
It might even have BEEN it.
LOL
Talk about a total piece of trash...
And then I remember Windows 2.0. I saw that one too. On my 4-color CGA card. I formatted my hard drive immediatly after running it. Hey, I did that after installing 3.0, and 3.1, too. But instead of reinstalling DOS/Win with 3.0 and 3.1, I installed Linux.